That it is today. They called it the jewel city. It rose from the mud flats of San Franciscos waterfront. A cosmopolitan wonderland built to last just ten months. One of the only vestiges of this lost city is this building, the palace of fine arts. But in 1915 this was just one of many grand palaces that lined the avenues of a 635acre mini metropolis constructed to host the worlds fair in the area known today as the marina district. The fair drew some 19 Million People, mostly for the thrill of exploring displays and demonstrations that highlighted the progress of industry, technology, and culture over the centuries. If you pushed through the turnstiles, youd find yourself directly in front of a 435foottall stepped tower. 43 stories tall. Adorned with more than 100,000 colored jewels hung in such a way that they could move in the breezes, so the entire building sparkled day and night. The fair also called the panamapacific International Exposition to celebrate the completion of the panama canal was an opportunity for san franciscans to show the world that they had risen from the ashes of the earthquake and fires that demolished the city in 1906. The fairs aura of opulence was intended to set the stage for San Franciscos rise as a cultural and economic powerhouse establishing it as americas gateway to trade with the pacific. To make the fair a success the citys Diverse Communities had to come to the table and put aside polarizing social and political tensions, some of which persist today. We had the unions and the commercial organizations and the city itself. And many of these people really didnt like each other very much. And yet they banded together and really worked in concert towards this goal of creating the jewel city. The fairgrounds featured exhibition halls dedicated to everything from machinery to horticulture within which were some 80,000 displays. There was also an area called the joy zone, with amusement parkstyle rides and concessions. Visitors could marvel at daredevils like art smith looping his flaming plane through the sky. Foreign and state pavilions displayed their own attractions, including the liberty bell transported all the way from philadelphia. Fine art sculptures appeared around every bend, and revolutionary lighting techniques bathed the fairgrounds in a swirl of color. Luminaries like henry ford, Thomas Edison and Luther Burbank were on hand to showcase the inner workings of modern industry, technology, and science. Model ts and levi jeans rolled off Assembly Lines in mini factories. And visitors could see lifesaving infant ink batore incubators, the latest typewriters, and a working replica of the panama canal. Although a world apart from the carnage of world war i, under way across the atlantic, the fair was no escape from many of the social struggles unfolding on the home front. Class tensions and prejudices that divided San Francisco and much of america were on full display here, including derogatory depictions of different ethnic groups and the barring of africanamericans from being hired for certain jobs at the fair. But the fair was meant to be sort of inclusive to gain the broad public support that the fair officials needed to make this happen they billed it as something that was going to create jobs and bring the city together. And for some groups that was really true, and for other groups it wasnt. But there were also displays conventions, and other opportunities within the fair for social debate. Some of the foreign delegations actually protested against some of the more racist concessions and got them changed. In an era without the internet or other widereaching forms of communication, this worlds fair was a place where diverse groups could voice their concerns and try to reshape perceptions. It also provided a lens through which to observe the shaping of San Franciscos future as an epicenter of economic and cultural innovation. Although the entire fair complex was dismantled 100 years ago today in 2015 the public is being invited to step inside the restored walls of the only remaining building, the palace of fine arts, into a space now known as the innovation hangar, where people can observe and interact with artists, makers, and others as they develop ideas that could shape our future. I think one of the most important things about 1915 was that you could really bring together millions, in this case 19 Million People, to have a shared observation on some of the most important innovations of our time. So many times right now in our world we interact virtually. And its important. But theres still something to be said for the idea of people coming together to experience something together. The fair centennial will also be marked by the opening of an extensive exhibit by the California Historical society yearlong music and arts festivals, and other celebrations around the city that invite us to reflect on the continuing legacy of the jewel city. San francisco remained such a center of technology and innovation, and i really believe that the seed of that can be seen within the exhibit palaces of the 1915 exposition. It also succeeded in attracting tourists and investment in the entire state and immigrants, and these were all goals that went on for years afterwards. It was really a turning point in San Franciscos history. Around the same time as the worlds fair, work was beginning on another endeavor to push the bay area into the modern age. A water supply system known as hetch hetchy. Now crews are trying to bring this system into the 21st century before the next earthquake. The water comes from yosemite and feeds portions of the east bay, south bay, and peninsula. In october a tunnel that runs underneath San Francisco bay was completed. By the end of this month crews will finish another tunnel from the sunol valley to fremont. After that theyll complete the cal veras dam. Heres kqed Senior Science editor andrea kissic. Less than a mile from mission boulevard in fremont engineers with the San FranciscoPublic Utilities commission are descend descending deep underground to inspect the progress on a new tunnel. This piece right here, weld this in place concrete it, and then well be ready this ninefoot diameter tunnel will soon carry more than 62000 gallons a minute on average each day to four bay area counties. Its a key step in upgrading and replacing parts of a system that has served the bay area for 80 years. Were here at the new rivington tunnel. This is one of the most critical pieces of our system. Because when were done in february and we put this tunnel into service its going to carry water to serve 2. 6 Million People in the bay area. Dan wade is the director of the hetch hetchy Water System Improvement Program. At a cost of nearly 5 billion its one of the largest Engineering Projects in the nation. The new irvington tunnel is steel lined and it has a concrete reinforcement. And that ensures that we have a reliable earthquakeresistant tunnel well into the future. The San FranciscoPublic Utilities commission is in charge of making sure the taps keep flowing with this water. It originates 167 miles away at Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in yosemite. But much of the system was built in the 1920s and 30s. Today a major earthquake could leave parts of the bay area without water for a month. One of the primary goals of the Water System Improvement Program is to ensure that within 24 hours after a major earthquake we will be able to deliver water to the customers. And to pay for it water rates have been going up. Way up. For the systems customers who live in San Francisco san mateo alameda, and santa clara counties. 1 3 of the customers live in San Francisco, and so theyre going to pay 1 3 of the bill. And the other 2 3 will be paid by our customers outside of San Francisco. San francisco residents will see their water rates approximately triple by the time the program is done. The voterapproved Program Began in 2004 and is scheduled to end in 2018. But theres a rumbling urgency to get it done. We have the calaveras fault, the hayward fault in the east bay, and then of course the San Andreas Fault on the peninsula, and our water system crosses all three of those major faults. The u. S. Geological survey a few years ago predicted that by 2035 theres more than a 63 chance that there will be a major earthquake here in the bay area. So were truly in a race against time. The work is on track and occasionally even ahead of schedule. One of our most impressive projects is the new bay tunnel which is a fivemile pipeline underneath the San Francisco bay and its the first true tunnel thats been constructed underneath the bay. To help shield it from the shaking during an earthquake the team built this new tunnel in a bed of thick clay, 100 feet beneath San Francisco bay. Finished in october, it replaces two pipelines built in 1925 and 1936 and carries water from the east bay to San Francisco and the peninsula. The hetch hetchy water system has been serving us very well throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. However, the infrastructure is old. Its aging. Its in need of repair or replacement or upgrades. With most of the roughly 80 upgrades and replacements done the construction crews are hard at work on the toughest and biggest project of them all. Calaveras dam was built in 1925, and it forms Calaveras Reservoir which is the largest local reservoir thats part of our system. Because of the recognition that this dam was vulnerable to a large earthquake here on the calaveras fault we needed to permanently restrict the reservoir level to about 40 of capacity. This new dam is being built near the alamedasanta clara county line out of earth and rock like the old dam. The new dam, however will be seismically stronger, which will allow the Calaveras Reservoir to fill to capacity. 31 billion gallons. Californias in a severe drought. We need this reservoir for drought carryover storage. In fact, the program has a goal of meeting a drought period of 7 1 2 years tone sure that we can continue to supply water to our customers in that length of drought. As construction crews scour the valley walls and erect a watertight foundation, a reminder will remain of what was once the Worlds Largest earth and rock dam. When this new dam is complete in 2018 we will actually cut a notch and remove about 1 3 of the existing dam so that the reservoir can come up against the face of the new dam. Dan wade and his team are more than halfway done replacing the dam. A critical step in protecting hetch hetchys water from a big quake that could strike at any moment. Waters a precious resource. We cannot live without it. Were doing something thats going to have a lasting effect to ensure the longterm health and safety and economic viability of the San Francisco bay area. The digging at the Calaveras Dam has uncovered hundreds of fossils. Paleontologist jim walker showed us a few of his finds. Every day i come out here im very excited. I get to look for fossils from creatures that lived 20 million years ago. Today we found two vertebrae from a whale. This is a creature that was probably between the size of a large dolphin and a killer whale. In the past weve found sharks teeth. This is a tooth of a megalodon. Its a prehistoric shark that lived 20 million years ago. This individual based on the tooth side would have been about 25 to 30 feet long. To date we have over 650 fossils. From fossils to the future. Automation is revolutionizing work and the workplace. We see it at Companies Like amazon, where robots fill orders in the warehouse, and also at tesla, where they help build cars, and here in our own Television Studios we have robotic cameras. Joining us now to discuss this revolution are john markoff, New York Times reporter and author of the forthcoming book machines of loving grace the quest for Common Ground between humans and robots. And Technology Forecaster and stanford professor paul saffo. Welcome to you both. Paul lets begin with you. What do you see as the next phase of automation . Well, the next phase is clearly the impact of robots and the impact of robots on our jobs. Weve been losing jobs to automation for a very long time over 100 years. The difference is in the past machines destroyed jobs but they also created more jobs than they destroyed. And something has happened in the recent past, the last ten years where in fact we seem to be destroying more jobs than were creating. Thats the big issue. And as you see if you think of this as a baseball game what inning are we in . In terms of the percentage of jobs that are ultimately going to be filled by automation, by robots. I would think of decades instead of innings. Were at the start of a multidecade process. Its already affecting people today. But this is going to be a 30year transition to a very different world and lots of turbulence in the meantime. And john, you know paul touched on how were not creating as many jobs as weve seen in the past with other technological revolutions. As you researched your book what did you learn about the benefits of having robots in the workplace aside from the cost savings . Well, there are obvious and just dramatic benefits. I mean, things are more efficient. You save labor costs. And oftentimes the quality of the jobs can actually be better, or jobs that are bad go away. But im a little bit of a skeptic on the question of whether we have a clear answer of whether Technology Just kills jobs. If you look at whats going on right now in our country, theres this remarkable debate about jobs and automation thats sprung up again for the first time in a long time. And its kind of like rashomon. Everybodys looking at whats going on and everybody has a different opinion. And i dont think different opinion about . About whether technology this time around is killing more jobs than its creating. I think its still an open question. Whats the equation . How does a company decide when its worthwhile to go to automation . It depends on the company. Its sort of two parts. First one is cost savings. So we saw the wave of offshoring after 2000, jobs going to china for manufacturing. But as the labor costs in china rose, that became less appealing. More importantly you had Companies Like i know of one Solar Company that reshored its jobs to arizona because what they looked at and said wait a second, the labor cost is only a fraction of our manufacturing cost and what we really need is to have the designers and engineers next to the manufacturing floor so they can look at it more closely. But beyond that the other piece on manufacturing is it isnt just robots replacing human assemblers. Were designing systems that could not possibly be assembled by humans, that can only be assembled by machines. That begs the question, then. Looking to the future. Because some people are scared of this. They feel like their livelihoods are on the line. So what types of jobs will automation create . And then what types of jobs will it kill . Theres a new category of job that didnt exist ten years ago and no one thought it would. The job of Search Engine optimization. There are probably tens of thousands of people around the world doing that work. On the other side of the coin whats different about this wave of automation is its affecting whitecollar workers as much as bluecollar workers. Not just physical labor. Intellectual labor. But this is a key part of why this is a story now. That automation has been taking away bluecollar jobs forever. But a bunch of very smug whitecollar workers, lawyers, for example said well, no robot could possibly replace my job. Guess what . You know bots. A difference between a sxroebt a bot. A bot is a piece of software. A robot is something that looks scary and moves around. Bots are replacing lawyers today. Theyre replacing reporters in some cases. A. P. Announced theyre going to announce a lot of their cub reporter stories are going away. So in general, though, is it going to be initially in this initial phase is it going to be more likely physical jobs that get replaced or physical jobs have been replaced for decades and decades and decades. Whats happening now is that the top of the workforce is starting to be eliminated as well. Quite new. The way to think about it is any job that has any element of repetition is at risk. But let me make an important point here because against that background of worry and doubt three recent books have pointed to a particular kind of automation event, and that is instagram with its 13 employees they say in these books has displaced 140,000 workers at kodak. Yeah, thats dead wrong. And its absolutely dead wrong. Instagram could not have come into existence before the mature internet. And the mature internet probably created, what, 2 to 5 million jobs . A tremendous number. Many of them quite good jobs. So its a much more nuanced situation. Im wondering if theres a go ahead. Just to say on that, yes, it creates jobs. But the jobs are less stable. Seo is hot at moment. Seo. Sorry. Search engine optimization. This is like if you could code in html, which is the language of the World Wide Web in 1997 you could get a great job. Today you know, if you dont know html by the time youre a sophomore at stanford youre going to be taking a remedial class. Is there a risk of overreliance on automation . And im thinking, for example of the Asiana Airlines crash, where the pilot was so used to flying on automated flights that he couldnt really do actually, a better example is air france 447. The one that crashed in the middle of the atlantic. That went from level flight to hitting the water in 37 seconds. And what people dont realize, they say to themselves gee, i wouldnt want a robot to fly my plane. Guess what . If you fly in planes today, it is being flown by a robot. Sure. A pilot is incapable, a human is incapable of flying an a340 or a 7 but thats what i mean. Isnt that a risk . There are risks, but look at the risk of human driving, for example. There is a debate now going on about the notion of selfdriving cars and what kinds of accidents theyll have. But i would argue that humans are such bad drivers that however bad or however many accidents we have from robot drivers they will pale compared to the carnage thats created every year by human drivers. Let me ask you about the broader economic picture here. You know, much of our economy is based on people, you know buying things. Robots dont buy things. They dont pay into social security. They dont pay taxes. What does this mean for us down the line in the Broader Market in terms of the Economic Impact . So you know, robots themselves dont buy things. But robots the deployment of robots can actually create as well as destroy jobs. I mean, this debate that im seeing, on one hand you have Computer Scientists like moshe vardi a wellknown Computer Scientist at Rice University who argues that no jobs at all by 2035 2045. All jobs gone. And on the other side you have the International Federation of robotics that argues that robots, the deployment of robots is going to create a job renaissance. Whos right . Stay tuned. I dont really know. In many ways its an echo of what happened. This whole idea of robots stealing jobs is like a comet on a loopy orbit that shows up about every 20 years. And my favorite episode of this was in the mid 60s when sociologist daniel bell and others said robots are going to take all of our jobs by 1985 and the result is the great social challenge of 1985 would be trying to figure out what to do with all of our spare time. John your book of course talks about finding Common Ground between people and robots. What would that look like . Well, i think it has to do with how we design these systems. For example siri is a bot. Right . And its designed to let us interact with it. And its designed in a sense to be a partner, not to be a master, not to be a slave. And i think we have to actually think about that carefully. We have an opportunity to design these machines with which were going to be interacting not only like siri but theyre starting to move around and you know, were going to be interacting with them as they walk around our environment. But do we want that necessarily . Like for example, ucsf hospital now there are robots going up and down the halls. I dont know what theyre doing. Delivering pills or sheets. All of the above. Tell him the example of what you saw at the Stanford Golf Course. This is so i parked at the Stanford Golf Course a morning probably seven months ago and a woman pulled up next to me in a tesla. And she pulled her golf cart out and set it up. And then she walked away and the golf cart followed her. And my jaw hit the ground. But then of course i googled it. And you can have a robotic golf cart for 1,795. I mean, its an early example. But you know google had andy ruben set up a robotics division. And his whole intent is building a class of machines that can move around autonomously. Not just cars but things that walk or roll. And google bought a bunch of Robotics Companies recently. Thats right. In the future do you see a phase where we where the way we communicate with devices and with robots will be very much like the way we communicate with humans . Will they evolve to that point . And how do you prepare for that . Especially with the next generation coming into the workplace. What kind of training do we have to do with them . Well, you know, well talk to our robots. But more importantly, think about a future where your robot communicates with you the way your dog communicates with you. That it very carefully observes you. Youre not paying any attention. And this device is quietly in your life anticipating your mood or what your needs are and responding. And i think that happens first in the world of elder care. Yeah. We dont have the people power to take care of an aging population, and robots potentially are a way that we can do that. What do we lose by not having that interaction, though . It depends on how we design the machines. Were basically were imbuing those machines with our qualities. And its a design question. And we can make them as science fiction, horrible an example of that is a design question. The problem with automation on airplanes is things go right so much of the time that when things go wrong theres not enough time for the pilot to intervene. So at nasa they did a Research Project where the plane asks for advice and help even when it doesnt need it so it keeps the human in the mode of responding to the machine. Thats the sort of stuff were going to see, as these devices come in our lives. On that note well leave it there. This has been a fascinating discussion. We could have gone on for another, i dont know four hours here. Thank you both. Paul saffo with stanford and john markoff with the New York Times. Thank you. And for more of our coverage please go to kqednews. Org. Thanks for joining us. Im scott shafer. And im thuy vu. Thanks for joining us. Have a good night. Funding for kqed arts is provided by the william and Flora Hewlett Foundation helping people build measurably better lives. And the california arts council, a state agency, advancing california through the arts and creativity. Support for science programming is provided by these generous contributors. Captioning sponsored by wnet sreenivasan on this edition for sunday, february 22 the head of Homeland Security warns Mall Shoppers to be vigilant in the face of terror threats from militant groups overseas; what im saying if anyone is planning to go to the mall in America Today they have to be particularly careful. Sreenivasan what walmarts decision to raise wages might mean for the rest of the u. S. Economy; and in our signature segment, the poor struggling to stay warm during this harsh winter. I have to decide to buy medicine or see my feed my graj father or pay utility bills